The Library & The Violin
by Lady Catkin
Summary: Izsterlia can't sleep and she doesn't want to admit why. The Doctor doesn't sleep in general, but finds one way to cope, leaving Iz with her own ideas on how to help them both.  Short 2 part fic. 8th Dr & OC
1. Part I

Izsterlia thrashed about, knotting the layers of blankets around her legs, whilst others made murky puddles of fabric on the floor by the bed.

She lay flat on her back now, staring at the ceiling, a scowl fixed on her face.

A lot of what she did in life was mainly through necessity and sleep was one of those things. She had figured out a long time ago, whilst at the academy, that sleep was the thing you did in order to be ready for battling through another day. You couldn't lie there thinking or worrying, you just simply switched off and that was it.

It didn't always occur like that for her though, if she was completely honest with herself. Tonight was definitely one of those occasions.

Her room was pitch black, but despite there being no light source, she was still acutely aware of her surroundings.

She reached out to the little wooden table at the side of her bed, and found a little flat square object. She wafted it a couple of times until it illuminated, filling the room with an eerie pool of bright blue light.

She brought it towards her eyes, squinting with its sudden brightness "Urgh, 1:30am relative" she murmured "brilliant".

She reached back over to the little table and dropped the square of light down onto it. She sighed loudly, as if making herself aware of her own objection and punctuated it by flapping her lips together as she let out yet another huffing sigh.

Deciding that there was little use trying to sleep, she sat up in her small single bed, letting the remaining covers fall to her waist. She swung her legs over the side of the thin mattress and stood in the blackness.

"Lights" she said quietly.

The single source of light in the ceiling dimly flickered on, lighting the small room that she called her own aboard the TTC. Its current and longest running occupant preferred to call it his 'TARDIS', a colloquial term that she had little care for, but had no great aversion to.

Her room was small and simple, exactly as she had specified.

It was little more than nine feet wide and twelve feet long, enough for her to place a small metal framed bed, a little wooden night stand by the head of it and a wardrobe for her meagre belongings. She had been bemused by the Doctor's suggestion that she should perhaps consider moving to more comfortable quarters whilst she remained aboard. She had also wanted to laugh when he had once poked his head round the door, wrinkled his nose in distain and trotted off again, muttering something about it reminding him of a prison cell from the eighteen-nineties. Izsterlia could only presume he had been referring to a time period - one where prison cells were not especially pretty.

She cast a tired eye about the room and found everything in order.

Her long black boots stood obediently next to the wardrobe, leaning slightly against it as though even they had managed to find some sort of repose.

"I'm envying boots now" she sighed, sliding her long thin fingers over her face.

She turned to face her little wooden stand and picked up a simple wooden hair brush, and began to pull its prongs gently through her mass of softly falling raven curls. After she was happy that every lock was suitably detangled, she placed it back down carefully, frowning at it.

Brushing her hair usually had the odd tendency to make her sleepy, but it hadn't worked this time. 

Why couldn't she sleep?

She stood by her bed and closed her eyes, chewing on her bottom lip.

The answer was stark and obvious, but it did not make it any easier for her to admit or digest. How was she to reconcile this growing, no, burgeoning mass of messy, knotted thoughts and feelings that now easily occupied her mind?

It was like a virus – it had invisibly and unnoticeably gained access to her hearts and soul, mercilessly seizing her. There were few things she could imagine that could possibly cure her and so far, all the ones she had suggested to herself made her feel sick.

She breathed in deeply and exhaled just as slowly.

This jumbled web of emotion, heaving like a stormy sea inside her, was getting clearly out of hand now, especially if it was starting to interfere with her sleep. It had already stopped her eating, paying attention and made her stumble over words. She hated being unable to even control herself, she just wanted to be free of it all – but that would mean taking one of the very unpleasant options open to her and she had already decided none of them were viable.

Right now, in the early hours of the morning, all she wanted to do was sleep, but then, what sleep did she really have?

Her mind entwined her thoughts with her feelings and played out impossible scenario's where her desires were more than sated and realised. She would wake in the morning aching in every single way, brimming with wants and needs that she never knew she was even capable of.

She wasn't a coward, which was something no-one had ever had the guts to say to her, at least to her face. In fact, she had garnered an infamous reputation back on Gallifrey for charging in and rolling her sleeves up. She had never understood why problems that had cropped up within Time Lord society had managed to cripple it for so long. Then along she came, a whirlwind of determination and resolve.

So why couldn't she just _deal_ with this? Deep down she knew why and she hated herself for it. It was fear. She _feared_ the consequences of her actions and it was that fear that kept her stuck between an extremely large rock and a particularly impenetrable hard place. How did humans pick their way through this? To them, these sorts of matters were common place and routine. Back home, these sorts of fancies and feelings were instantly dismissed and laughed away. What was it she was told at the Prydon Academy? Time Lords do not need to engage in such 'business' as they were evolved far beyond the need for that. After those words were uttered, the tutor would usually glance wistfully at the seal of Rassilon above the door and then scan the room sternly for any student not looking as though they completely agreed.

She had been sent to the Dean's office immediately.

She had disagreed instinctively there and then and the price for having that opinion was ridicule by her fellow students, which was nothing new, and a firm telling off by the Dean of the Chapter. Undeterred, she had in fact written a very cleverly worded paper on the matter and published it. She'd have even gotten away with her 'free thinking' if it hadn't been for her tutor, Lord Elsbub, a thin, silently angry type, showing it to the Dean. She'd been suspended over it whilst it had been 'investigated' and she was only allowed back into the academy if she agreed to write a paper retracting it.

She had. An even _more_ clever, innuendo filled missal named "Reasons not To Love ".

Now her mind had wickedly made her admit it to herself by dragging that old memory up!

"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!" she hissed to herself, as she hopped about in a little circle. She had sworn never to use _that word_ in relation to how she felt. No, it wasn't that particular emotion she felt towards him was it. Was it? Her tired and aggrieved head spun as a torrent of newly formed ideas stomped about inside her head like an army of trolls thumping over a wooden bridge.

She knew she should give in and let the thoughts form and then fall apart again until they settled into some form or other.

Not tonight though. Tonight she was completely determined to be free, even for just a short time.  
>"To the books" she muttered cryptically to herself and she shuffled forwards to find her slippers and to shrug on her long grey dressing gown that hung limply on the door of her wardrobe.<p>

She stepped out into the corridor of the ancient time travel capsule and turned left.

Heading left, she had found, was usually the best bet when it came to navigating around the TARDIS. It moved itself about regularly, like it was stretching itself. The only problem with this, was that it would rearrange things at impromptu moments.

The upshot of which, resulted in the semi-regular occurrence of one emerging out of the bathroom clad in little more than a towel and taking three quarters of an hour trying to find your room again.

It was times like that, that Izsterlia missed the more up-to-date models of the TTC's that were used now on Gallifrey. She never had those sorts of problems on them, to the contrary, when it came to designing upgrades, she and the gaggle of chief designers and engineers would 'um' and 'arr' for months trying to find a way of somehow improving on perfection.

This made her smile as she trundled down the darkly lit corridors that snaked back and forth and up and down. The bureaucracy always did make her smile, it was so pointless and so wasteful, but it gave people security and a sense of purpose, so who was she to cut through all of that red tape?

Other times, she did mind. Very much indeed, especially when faced with the High-Bloody-Council. Just the thought of them made her more awake and alert as she walked along, picking up her pace a bit. She tended to view them as a pack of self-indulgent idiots whose only goal in life was to make her own administration as difficult as possible.

She muttered several expletives under her breath which gave her an enormous sense of satisfaction by the time she was finished. It was safe to say there was no love lost between the upper echelons of government on Gallifrey and the Commander.

As she huffed and grumbled, her mind decidedly taken off the 'other matter', she reached the door she was seeking: the library.

She had come to really enjoy the library on board the TARDIS; it was very unlike any aboard the newer type TTC's that she was used to working with. In fact, it wasn't anything like any she had ever encountered, which was probably why she liked it so much.

In every other library she had ever been in, she had never had a book physically brought to her by a turtle that then wandered back off into the dark forest of shelves and bookcases. Nor had she been greeted by two bats that insisted on seeking her out every time she entered and lying on her shoulders, purring loudly when she stroked them as she read.

She reached out in the dim light for the handle, when a noise suddenly arrested her ears, causing her hand to pause in mid-air.

It was a soft, bittersweet sound that gently dispersed on the air like perfume.

She turned her head in the direction it appeared to be coming from and followed it, curiosity getting the better of her. Her tired mind found itself easily susceptible, like a rat following the enchanting sound of the Pied Pipers playing.

Her feet seemed to know the way and she allowed herself to be led by them.

The sound was ethereal, like none other she had ever heard before. She was certain it wasn't a recording as it had a crystal clarity to it that separated it from past to present.

After a few minutes of wandering the corridors, she eventually came to the door that seemed to be the only barrier now between her and the music. She looked at it with puzzlement; it was the one that lead into the console room.

"Okay..." she said almost silently, smiling with her uncertainty and eagerness to investigate.

She pushed open the door as slowly and as noiselessly as she could possibly manage and peeped through the gap.

The entire console room was lit by only the blue light of the Time Rotor and the small glimmers of the controls and dials on the console. It cast a strange collection of fierce, jagged shadows all over the viewable objects, making them seem threatening and leering.

Far be it for Izsterlia to feel unnerved by being faced with any scene after her years in the military and before that, the Gallifreyan guard units, but this sent a shiver down her spine.

Her smiles had all faded now and were replaced by concern; why did this scene make her feel so uneasy? Then there was the music, that beautiful, heart rendering music that soared into the purest, highest octaves and dipped deep down, reaching into the listeners soul and rendering them open for all to see.

She wrapped her arms around herself in a bid to stave off the shivers that tumbled over her skin. Who was making this music? The Doctor? Surely not, he was hardly a philistine by any means, but despite the numerous talents he did surprisingly possess, she had not thought for one moment that he could play like _that_.

She looked around the room once more, but could not see another living soul. Perhaps it was a piece of music the Doctor had left on and forgotten about. Perhaps her ears deceived her and it was a recording after all. Yet when she touched the door in order to open it further, it trembled with the vibrations created by each note being played.

She crept in stealthily, now eager to solve the mystery.

She moved softly across to the dais, upon which the console itself stood.

As she got so close to it that she was about to lift her foot to step up onto raised platform, she saw him.

Transfixed now with her foot hanging in mid air, like she was about to start marching, she gaped at the figure with his back to her, playing the violin.


	2. Part II

**A/N Thought I'd kick off the second part of this story with a note. Like 'Persuasion', this story does just hang there without context and even refers to events that I am still writing about! This is a bit of an exercise in trying to work out the mechanics and indeed, dynamics of this particular relationship. The inspiration for this story is from a gorgeous painting of the 8****th**** Doctor playing the violin by the deviant art lady 'Timedancer'. Check it out, it's wonderful. It in turn was inspired by a scene in the 'Year of Intelligent Tigers' (an EDA). Anyway, this story is a bit fluffy, but I hope you enjoy it regardless!**

She eventually realised that she wasn't breathing, making her tighten her diaphragm quickly in order to suck some air into her aching lungs. She must have been stood there for a few moments for that to happen, she thought. It took some doing for the respiratory by-pass system that her Gallifreyan physiology afforded her to actually kick-in. How long had she been stood there like a transfixed moron?

She rested her foot now, amused with herself for leaving it like that for so long and gingerly crept round the platform, to take in this sight.

The man playing the violin was, indeed, the Doctor, but he didn't particularly look _right._ Even from the back. She had decided not long after they had first met that he was odd in every conceivable way and for that reason alone she liked him. However, even by those standards, this was a little bit out of the ordinary.

With virtually no light at all, he was stood wearing his waistcoat, which hung open, and shirt, which had most of the buttons undone. His usual trousers looked creased, she observed, and he had nothing on his feet.

She delicately took another step closer, her foot colliding in the dark with something soft on the floor. She glanced down to see a wide ribbon of material that she was willing to bet was his discarded cravat.

She turned her attention back to him and looked at his face, now marvelling at the sight of him.

His usual array of floppy golden brown curls where half covering his face and his eyes were closed. His wrists and fingers looked entirely elegant as they moved over the instrument and bow to create the sounds that where now loud and chiming in her ears.

She wondered if he was in some sort of trance like state, his eye brows lifting only in relation to the music he played as if to accent the emotion behind it. Other than that, he made no other movement.

She decided to be a sort of secret audience for him and stood a few feet away as he played on, rapt by the image he presented.

The music spoke not just to her hearts, but to her soul.

Memories of her brutally unhappy childhood, her discovery, the tests, the pain, the misery, all flooded into the forefront of her mind. Tears slipped from her silver eyes and in the dim light, her eyes glittered with tears still waiting their turn to fall.

Then the music rose and quickened, the sad moments of her life evaporated as she felt joy beyond words or description. The first memory of boundless joy her mind latched onto was her dreams, the recent ones. The things that had been keeping her awake at night and making her daytimes more and more impossible to deal with.

She wanted to close her eyes and push those thoughts and feelings away. They were too much for her right now to deal with. She did not want to face them or admit to them, even to herself. They were just fantasies and 'schoolgirl' daydreams; they were not something that was worth turning her existence upside down and back to front for.

Or at least that was what she told herself constantly.

Yet the music, that uplifting and soul-aching music had thrown open her bare being and somehow managed to find the truth buried deep within her. It dragged it out with ease until it stood there in front of her... playing the violin.

More tears, heavy, abundant tears dripped down her face.

_No!_

Her mind screamed that word, but her hearts were beating too quickly and her innards turning into wildly swarming butterflies.

Was it _that_ terrible? That truly, horribly terrible for her to be in love?

_You're not in love!_

Her common sense and brain were losing the battle over her instincts and feelings.

_You are in love. There is nothing wrong or terrible about it. You should never feel afraid or guilty for loving another._

The realisation seemed timed because as those words sunk in, the music ceased.

She looked up, dazed, at the Doctor who was now silently regarding her with the most interesting mixture of concern and surprise.

He was standing with the bow and the instrument in either hand, by his sides. He opened his mouth to say something, but he clearly thought better of it and closed it again.

She felt like such a fool! Stood there in her night attire, crying in front of the Doctor!

There was no point trying to betray her emotions now, everything seemed too bare and unlocked. She didn't think she could take it if she tried to laugh it off or try and regain some sort of composure.

Instead, she acted on pure instinct, at long last.

She stepped forward, taking the bow and the violin out of the Doctor's hands and laid them both, side by side on the floor of the dais, with utter reverence. She paused, looking down at them for a moment, as if she had just made an offering to a God of Music.

She turned her head towards him, reaching out to take his hand.

His hand was warm and soft in hers and she turned it over, gazing down at it as if it was the first time she had seen it. Both of her hands held one of his, looking down at as if it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She wondered then and there is it was his hands she had first fallen for. She remembered that first mission that had started all of this, of being sat by the stream on a hot sunny day in the grounds of Aelred and Augustina's fine house. She remembered taking his hand in hers then, without even thinking and how he had let her without question.

She had held his hand in hers countless times since then and it was only recently that she had become wary of doing so and stopped. She had felt the angry pain in her chest swell and mount if she so much as touched him, so holding his hand all the time was impossible to continue.

She had never once questioned if he minded her doing it, or, more importantly, questioned why it was he didn't mind.

She traced an invisible shape on his palm, delighting in his fingers flexing to touch her wrist. The thrill it gave her guaranteed her instincts command over her.

Never in her life had she acted on them so blindly. She had survived countless assassination attempts since she was installed in her many and varied high level posts within the inner High-bloody-Council for a reason. She had always been in control.

Here, she was indulging in abandonment.

She pulled his hand to her cheek and she closed her eyes, revelling, at long last, in his touch. She felt his body shift slightly as he turned towards her more, before becoming still once again. She didn't care. As long as he didn't push her away and she could feel his palm against her cheek and his finger tips buried in her hair, she really did not care.

She turned her face into his palm and kissed it, holding it against her face with her hands.

She pulled it round gently, so that her lips were against fingers, and she kissed each one in turn.

She avoided his eyes; she did not want to even dare see what was written on his face.

Her mind guessed, cutting her down with uncertainty by saying he was laughing at her, or grinning at her – anything that made a mockery of her. She stuffed those thoughts away into the back of her mind and concentrated on what her hearts were saying with each heavy thud.

She reached out, again, carefully avoiding his face, taking his other hand in hers. The one she already had, she placed on her waist, beneath her open dressing gown. She then repeated everything she had done the first hand, kissing it and holding it – enjoying each sacred millimetre of it.

Next, she gently took the Doctor by the hand and led him off the platform and out of the control room.

The corridor seemed even darker than the control room had been and she stared blankly into the darkness ahead as she walked, the Doctor obediently following her.

They reached the door to the library, her original destination that night.

She didn't look at him, she couldn't and her hearts were racing like she had just finished a training session with the recruits on Karn. She wasn't sure that if she looked at him, she wouldn't just burst into tears and what little composure she did possess was being invested in what she was doing now.

She led him inside the magnificent room, although she could not imagine how it could be simply described as a room.

The library seemed to stretch on infinitely to one side where the endless array of bookshelves lived. In the main part of the library, a huge fireplace stood with a roaring fire crackling away in the grate, which was always lit.

The lights were low in there at night, the TARDIS seemed to automatically reduce lighting in accordance to relative time – time relative to Gallifrey that is. She wondered if it changed when humans where travelling with the Doctor. An Earth day was different in length to a Gallifreyan one and then dependant on season.

She was wasting time by thinking about these things and she knew it, but she was plugging the holes in her hearts where doubt was desperately trying to sneak in and ruin this.

She lead him over to a huge, brown leather sofa that she favoured herself for times when she would curl up with a book and snuggle up under a blanket.

She took his lower arms in her hands and manoeuvred him into the middle of the sofa, pushing him backwards until he took the gentle hint to sit down. His eyes searched for hers and she knew there was only so long she could go without looking into them. She closed her own first, taking a deep breath before opening them, looking into the eyes of the seated Time Lords in front of her.

Her breath caught in her chest, not quite able to make its way back out of her lungs to complete a breath. The look on his face, in his eyes – there weren't words or means... she couldn't describe it because she had nothing to compare it to.

He wasn't smiling, but the look in his large ice-blue eyes was so soft and so kind, that the tears she had hung onto in the console room decided to make good their escape. She let out a defeated half-sob and she raised a hand to her face to try and futilely stem the flow.

The Doctor reached up with his long, slender fingers and touch her damp cheek, moving them down to her jaw line before simply dropping lower and taking her hands in his. He looked at them, this time smiling. He turned them over at the same time before squeezing them and kissing the back of her knuckles on both hands.

Izsterlia sniffled and squeezed back, part of her feeling disappointed by him. What was she hoping for though? For him to behave like those trashy twenty-second century human eNovels she had read when she was still trying to come to grips with human society? What did she expect?

She felt herself jarred forward slightly by him tugging her hands. She then made the instant decision to go ahead with the original plan that she had come up with in the console room.

She reluctantly pulled her fingers away from his and went to the far end of the sofa, sitting down with her back to the arm and her legs swung up onto it. Next, she leaned forwards and pulled the Doctor's arm, making him sort of fall sideways slightly. She tugged and pulled him until he understood what it was that she wanted him to do.

He sat mimicking her, his back in the direction on the arm which Izsterlia was resting her back on and his legs up on the sofa too. She reached forwards again, this time sliding her arms around his waist and pulling him backwards, until his back was resting on her front and his head was on her shoulder.

She could feel his whole body stiffen uncomfortably with the unfamiliarity of the position, yet curiously, he made no protest or tried to get back up.

A blanket was slung over the back of the leather sofa, an oatmeal coloured chenille that she often loved to wrap herself in. She reached out, with restricted arms movement, to grasp it, but couldn't quite reach. He saw what she was trying to achieve and assisted her by picking it up easily and casting it over them both, like he was throwing a fishing net over the side of trawler.

She felt her own body relax slightly, but his had not.

She bit her bottom lip as she gently pushed his soft hair behind his ears and then running her fingers through the rest of his hair. He relaxed slightly she could feel as the muscles in his back eased off a bit. She moved her fingers to his eye brows and smoothed them over before coming to a rest on his temples.

She began to massage them gently, causing him to tense slightly, before relaxing once more. She had a limited view of his face, but she could see his eyes slowly closing as she continued to rub.

She doubted that any other species in the universe found their temples as sensitive as a Gallifreyan did. It was a door to the mind and for a psycho-active race, which was a very important thing.

She thought of home – of the mountains and of the trees. She thought about the colour of the reeds by the river Gryble, of the Tafel shrews that ran amongst them in the summer, building their nests. She thought of the waves of the sea meeting the beach at Cully Point and the iridescent birds that lived high up in the blue faced cliffs there.

She hoped that these images were transferred into his mind, to bring him the same peace and joy that it brought her. She had not wanted to throw herself at his feet in the console room and admit the way she felt. She had seen his own torment and had wanted to rid him of it, even for one night. She wanted to cradle him in her arms as he slept, ensuring that he was at peace and that if he had a nightmare, she was there to defeat it. She wanted _his_ peace at any cost, even to her own detriment.

How long had it been since he slept properly and deeply? He had admitted to her before that he rarely slept. He had lied and said it was because he just had too much to do and to keep doing things to keep his brain happy. Instead, she knew that sleep induced some very problematic nightmares which he had no intention of facing.

The warmth and the closeness of his body, weirdly, felt comfortable and _right_. She hated the cliché as it sprung up inside her head and pulled a face at her before running off, but it did. She felt him relax more and more until she could detect his breathing getting deeper.

She chanced another look down and saw him sleeping, his eyes closed and his mouth slightly parted.

For the rest of her life, she wanted nothing more than to be here, forever, locked in this moment. She wanted to spend forever with her arms around him, cradling his head whilst he slept. She wanted nothing more than to be that person he called home instead of a place or a machine... she just wanted to live to make him happy.

She smiled at the wonderment she felt and allowed herself, for one brief, selfish moment, to make-believe that he was hers and this was how it would always be.


End file.
